Nonprofit survival strategies: Strengthening mutual support, ruthless prioritization

U.S. nonprofits are struggling to navigate this period of uncertainty and instability, facing heightened federal scrutiny to threats to their funding. Some organizations may go offline unexpectedly—because they’ve lost staff, data, funding, or other resources. How can the sector work to create stability and continuity? Based on my 25+ years working in nonprofit technology and consulting, here are some ideas on nonprofit survival strategies.

A new nonprofit mutual aid and defense strategy?

What if nonprofits formed a mutual aid and defense alliance to protect their interests as an ecosystem? What would be its core actions and components?

Policy advocacy: There are myriads of nonprofit associations, vertical-specific organizations like NTEN and Network for Good, and professional membership organizations. The National Council of Nonprofits, for example, has been responding to the executive orders and memos. However, there is not yet a collective 501(c)(4) advocacy organization or PAC funding entity working directly and solely on the survival of the sector. A mutual aid alliance could fill that gap by focusing on policy making and electoral interests.

Knowledge and resource sharing: Communities are often served by service organizations that overlap geographically but are highly specialized in meeting specific needs. This means that if one organization were to become incapacitated, an essential need could go unmet in that community. Spreading out these service specializations across organizations would help ensure that, should one become incapacitated, another organization could step in to deliver related services. Cross training, cross investment, and cross sharing of data may become much more critical. 

One example of this comes from my consulting with service organizations in San Francisco: The Asian community health center had to learn how to work with LGBTQ youth, the LGBTQ youth center needed to ensure their services embraced multi-racial/ethnic needs, the homeless shelter organization needed to understand how substance abuse, LGBTQ status, immigration status, and other factors affected their constituents. It required them to understand one another’s specializations and cultural contexts, so when constituents showed up on any organization’s doorstep, their needs could be recognized and met and they wouldn’t have to be sent elsewhere.

Mutual support: Under today’s circumstances, an organization could find itself deemed “unacceptable” at any given moment. Organizations that currently fit the definition of “acceptable” can leverage their relative safety to help shelter others:

• Be ready to extend fiscal sponsorship status to an organization that has its 501(c)(3) status revoked; this may put the sponsoring organization under scrutiny, but it will also help others survive when they have no alternative.
• Regrant funds, if possible, to organizations struggling to fundraise.
• Extend operational support to smaller and vulnerable organizations: HR, technology systems, staff time, and more. Share expertise and resources so their operations can continue uninterrupted.
• Act outside your comfort zone–ask your donors to step up on behalf of other organizations, invite new partners into your work, and be willing to understand new communities’ and organizations’ needs.

Accelerate and increase unrestricted giving: Now more than ever, nonprofits need more funding, more flexibly provided, for more infrastructural needs, and without the usual labor-intensive and time-consuming processes required to secure it. The best mutual aid comes in the form of unrestricted and committed dollars over the next two to five years, or even better, the next 10-15 years.

Ruthless prioritization over constant hustle 

In the current climate, nonprofits may be tempted to respond to every new change as it happens. The problem with this approach is that organizations will always be reacting and “hustling”; worse, it would require giving every new change equal priority. This is unsustainable; over time, it can only lead to staff burnout and organizational exhaustion.

Consider instead the art of “ruthless prioritization.” It isn’t just technology industry jargon but a way to force hard conversations about making choices in response to change. This does not in any way mean cutting off some constituents in order to survive. We need to acknowledge that, in such a rapidly changing environment, compiling complete checklists for action will only slow down urgently needed responses.

Here are some questions to ask both leadership and frontline staff in thinking about how to prioritize and develop your nonprofit survival strategies:

Return to your values: Are our values accelerating or slowing down our work, and how? Which projects are important to retain in all circumstances, and which can be put on hold to meet higher priorities?

Rethink programmatic priorities: Are the assumptions you’ve made about your programs and services still true? What has changed, and what needs to be added or removed? What are your constituents now telling you?

Look for internal and external redundancies: How can programs and services be combined, how can workloads be shared across partner organizations, and what needs to be cut in order to create easier pivots?

These uncertain times present an opportunity to revisit both individual and sector-wide assumptions about how nonprofits “should” go about their work. This may be the silver lining: Just as our country responded in new ways to major crises such as World War II and the COVID-19 pandemic, the nonprofit sector can rise to this challenge by creatively exploring new alliances, networks, partnerships, and funding sources to sustain one another. 

Photo credit: gorodenkoff via Getty Images